Recent attacks on small business reveal more than just ignorance on the part of those removing tax incentives for owners making over $400k annually. Why set the arbitrary level of annual income at $400k?

Small business owners do different things with their income. They don’t all buy luxury second homes as lawmakers playing the class envy card are claiming. Most reinvest in their companies. They care for their employees and hope a family member may go into the business someday. They reinvest if for no other reason than to stay competitive or be swallowed up. Their reinvestment plans are as individual as there are companies. The reinvestment may be a few thousand or many millions. Guess what, small businesses are not all alike.

For government to decide how best to use the income for millions of self-employed with one size fits all rules is ridiculous. Reinvestment for someone at the lowest income level and the highest income level may be equally risky. The economy depends on taking a risk with innovation. Why penalize just one income level? Lawmakers favoring this legislation for the most part are the ones who have never been employers. Some may know a lot about selling to government, but what’s their experience working in the free market? Often revealing is where their campaign contributions come from.

This is really just continued income confiscation. Tax and spend legislators shift their focus to different targets each session. Large Corporations learn to adjust to tax rules. Small businesses not so much. Plus, if you add up all the millions of small businesses to tax you can confiscate equal or greater funds for government spending than could be gained with another assault on large corporations. Regulations and fees are a way for the unelected to raise additional government revenue.

Oregon’s senior Senator has finally arrived. He is chair of the Senate Finance Committee. Not surprisingly, lobbyists shower most of their donations on committee chairs. Ron Wyden is famous for visiting each of Oregon’s counties each year, even Wheeler County with less than 2000 people. That’s good optics for the Senator who has lived on the affluent upper east side of Manhattan for decades. He is releasing a bill that will increase taxes on small business owners. Of course he has never signed the front of a paycheck in his life. He only knows what lobbyists tell him. Harming small business, the engine of our economy, must not go unnoticed.

In Oregon we had a similar and equally misguided event with the passage of SB 139. It will remove about $30 million from the private economy each year with government centric advocacy replacing reinvestment for economic growth of the private sector. Oregon’s Grand Bargain under Kitzhaber raised taxes on the large Corporations and did no harm to small business. If that was good policy, why suddenly turn the tables and go after the small businesses?


--Tom Hammer

Post Date: 2021-07-28 09:33:16

Last Update: 2021-07-28 10:10:34